Requirements
Overview
Wayfast Requirements have a crucial role in Wayfast development life-cycle. From and organizational standpoint requirements allow development teams to analyze what needs to be done, capture it and track it in an efficient way. But there are other important features associated to Requirements like Database access, object’s change history and productivity reports. The most important feature related to Wayfast Requirements is the Edit permissions in your Wayfast project. Requirements are a MANDATORY step before development. Without a requirement developers can’t modify pages in a Wayfast Project.
In this lesson we are going to review the organizational purpose of tickets and we will dig deeper in other related features in the “Database Access and Tickets” lesson.
Preconditions
For this lesson we are going to assume the project is already created.
Team’s Dashboard
First let’s click on “Requirements” icon at the top header.
The Requirement’s Dashboard will be displayed.
In this dashboard you can see all requirements for this project irrespective of who is the user assigned to it. This dashboard uses cards to represent work items (Bug/User Story/Simple Requirement) and contains four lanes to group items by status.
This make’s team’s meetings easier to follow. Pending is everything yet to be started, Development and Testing are things in progress and Finished contains everything closed.
Items can be filtered by Sprint and Requirement Type .
Let’s create a new work item and see how they look like.
How to create a new requirement?
Click on the “New Requirement” button.
The requirement creation screen is displayed and the first thing we need to do is decide what kind of template we are going to use.
There are three requirement templates. User story (for developing new features or planned adjustments), Bugs (for defects or things that are not working as designed) and Simple (that allows a single free text input).
Irrespective of the template we choose, it is always important to capture what we are trying to do, why we are doing it and provide context. This will be helpful for the team to understand changes when reviewing the project’s history when needed.
Let’s review the fields required in the User Story template.
Field | Description |
---|---|
Sprint | Allows the team to distribute user stories among iterations to plan the Project. |
Size | Indicates the effort associated to the requirement: |
Owner | Indicates the individual who this item is Assigned to. When a user is added to the team, there is an option to set it as default in this dropdown. |
Criticality | Allows to categorize items depending on the impact. The criteria for this categories can vary depending on the project, the team or the organization.
|
In this example we are going to use the “Simple” template which allows to input the requirement in a flexible way. Let’s type a description, anything you want. It could be something like “Add a Map to display the geo-localization of the company’s buildings” or “Create a Power BI report to list the amount of sales by branch”. The just just click on the “Submit” button.
Now the new work item is visible in the Requirements Dashboard:
The requirement is listed in the “Pending” bucket. Also it will be grouped in the “Pending Tasks” section of the Task List (at the left side of the window). The task list view is displayed in Wayfast all the time but you can collapse it using the blue triangle button.
How to activate a requirement?
Now that the requirement was created, we just need to go the Task List on the left side, select the requirement using the checkbox and click on “Activate Task” button. This will automatically move the item to the “Development” bucket.
Considerations
You can verify the requirement access by creating pages, trying to edit them or accessing the requirement details in Requirement’s dashboard.
If there is a database associated to the project Wayfast has the ability to grant developers access to the database automatically. This is meant to comply with the least permissions security rule. You can verify how database access is granted or revoked when you open or close a requirement by connecting to your DB using SQL Server Management Studio.
You can activate multiple requirements as long as they all belong to the same project. You can only open tickets for one project at a time.
Active tickets will prevent deployments to other environments. You must close every ticket before running an environment synchronization process.
Recap
In this lesson we learnt how to create new requirements and how this concept is essential to start developing your app since it’s mandatory for editing objects and getting access to project’s database. We have also reviewed how “Requirements” dashboard offers a global view of our project’s plan including tasks and status.
We will be covering more details about requirements implications in the deployment process in future lessons.